


Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace

by sli



Category: For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (1996)
Genre: Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 05:24:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1676354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sli/pseuds/sli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens to Jerry after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Midsummer2007 on livejournal. C6D 4ever.
> 
> For: nos4a2no9
> 
> Notes: Jerry's story post-film. Spoilerific, obviously. Title stolen from an earlier novel by the author of FTWHTWD. 1800 words or so. Many thanks to my beloved malnpudl for giving this the thumbs up.

 

Jerry is in the woods a long time. He watches, the same as before. Maybe he doesn't have to, but he doesn't know any other way. His whole life, he never knew what change would be like, dying or moving or being a different person. Even now he doesn't know.

He doesn't remember the words for the places you go after you die, never believed in them anyway. The deaths he'd seen didn't look like much besides pain and blood and everything stopping. But here he is.

He's dead, it's quiet, and he's in the woods. He doesn't mind, not really.

 

 

Men he knew when he was alive come and hunt and drink and piss on the burned camp and tell lies about him, but he doesn't mind that either.

Petrie comes by and after that the men mostly stop. Petrie checks on the place sometimes, but never answers Jerry when he asks if Rils is dead, and then he comes less often.

 

 

One day, an unfamiliar truck drives up. In it are Ralphie Pillar and Jerry's boy.

They get out of the truck and stand in the sun and look at the ruined camp. The wind ruffles Willie's hair and it's not until then that Jerry realizes that Willie is alive. The feeling he gets is more than anything he's felt since he died. It feels like being stabbed, only good. He wonders if maybe they did the operation even though he'd died. He never knew if they could do that.

Willie is taller and has hair and Jerry notices that he's not wearing a watch. Jerry looks down at his wrist, sees his father's watch there, and wonders for the first time what happened to it. Willie should have it. Loretta should give the boy his watch.

"You're looking good, looking good," Jerry tells the boy. "You should have my father's watch."

Willie doesn't look his way. His eyes follow Ralphie as he walks around the site, filling up space with his voice. Telling Willie about the building that used to stand here and how Jerry got blown out the door when it blew up. Willie listens, but Jerry can see from the way he looks at the place that he remembers the way it had been.

Willie and Ralphie stay for a while, picking through the camp and talking about Jerry. Ralphie does most of the talking, and Jerry sounds like a hero when Ralphie talks. Willie doesn't say much, but he seems good.

After they leave, Jerry is alone again. Sometimes he misses the camp stove, something to sit next to and watch as it crackles and burns.

 

 

 

The next time Willie comes, he's with Vera. Jerry doesn't know the truck she's driving, but he recognizes Willie a ways off.

Willie gets out of the truck first and walks away from it, moving quickly.

Vera follows him, that same tape recorder in her hand. "Do you remember spending time here with your father," Vera asks, and for a minute Jerry sees himself in her office again, her asking the wrong questions and him not knowing the right answers, and his fingers reach for a cigarette. The pack never runs out here, that's something.

Willie is standing apart from her, looking at the burned, grown-over camp. "Yeah, a little," he says, kicking a curled piece of roof.

"What do you remember about being here with your father," Vera asks.

Willie's hair is long now, long enough to tuck behind his ears. He's not very tall, but he looks older than last time he came. "Just being here," Willie says. "The usual stuff."

Vera doesn't like that any more than she liked Jerry's answers. "Were you frightened of your father?"

Willie says, "What. No," but he takes a while to say it.

Before he leaves, Willie says a prayer, one of the ones Loretta used to say. Jerry watches him, watches Loretta in his face.

 

 

The camp disappears under snow and reappears with the thaw.

 

 

Adele brings Willie the next time. She looks at the ruined cabin, then shakes her head and turns her back on it. She's facing away from Willie, and Jerry remembers anger, helplessness. He remembers how she shook that one time she held Willie, how tiny he was, and how she never saw the boy again after the tractor-trailer job and everything that happened after.

Jerry's voice is hard when he says, "Don't turn your back on the boy. Don't do that," but she's already talking over him, talking through him. Her voice is as warm and as sharp as ever he heard it, and she says "Are you sure?" and "All right, but don't tell your mother. And for god's sake don't tell Ralphie."

Then she teaches Willie how to shoot, and they come back again and again, and every single time Adele snorts and looks away from the camp. Jerry walks behind as Willie learns how to move through the woods, how to fire a killing shot and how to handle a carcass. Adele is brittle and impatient, but she guides Willie's hand gently. She says, "There's a right way and the wrong way around a gun," just like Joe used to. Like Jerry would have.

He remembers fishing with Adele, and how Joe was proud of her. She put that behind her, though, married Ralphie who didn't hunt, and bought her meat in plastic at the market. But now she's watching Willie and Jerry remembers her own baby that she gave up, and how she loved him once, and also sees the hardness life caused in her. Clear as day across her face is written: the most beautiful child in the world. And also that the fear has come upon her.

In the middle of gutting his first kill, Willie asks Adele about Jerry. She huffs, irritated, and changes the angle of the knife in his hand, making short, careful slashes through the hide. "Nothing about him is going to help you with this."

Later, she says, "He wasn't any good, but he loved you."

 

 

Sometimes he can remember Loretta's face perfectly, sweet Loretta and good Loretta and Loretta who flinched away from him.

 

 

Willie comes back by himself, on a gray day that feels like rain. He builds a fire and sits, a tangle of long legs and arms. Jerry hunkers down and sits next to him.

Willie says, "I don't have any pictures of you, except one they ran in the paper. Mom has one from when you got married. She can't seem to decide what to do with it, hangs it on the wall sometimes, then packs it away for a year. Long enough that I think it's gone for good, and then one day it's back up in the same place." He pokes the fire for a while, and then he says, "You're smaller in the picture."

Jerry wonders what he's smaller than, but he doesn't ask.

 

 

The next time Willie comes, he has a bruise on his cheek and scabs on his knuckles. He pulls a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lights one and doesn't say anything for a long time.

"I beat up Jim Murray," he says. "I'm suspended for three days even though I didn't start it."

Jerry nods, looks at the cigarette in his hand.

"People say things," Willie says.

"People do that," Jerry says. "It's good to stand up for yourself. Gotta stand up for yourself." That doesn't seem enough, so he says, "School is important, it's good you're still in school."

 

 

There's a raccoon that comes around. Jerry wonders if it's the same one from before. Probably not.

 

 

Willie brings a girl out. They fuck under a blanket in the back of the truck. Jerry stays away for that part, but afterwards the sound of their voices draws him close. Willie points up at the sky and tells her the names of the stars. Jerry leans against the truck and tilts his face up, listening.

 

 

Nick Denys and a man Jerry doesn't know come and clear what's left of the camp, looking around like it's church or a favorite bar long-shut, then talking in loud voices as they work. Jerry wonders if he should go then, but he doesn't.

Then they come back and Willie is with them. Willie's grown, and he swears and laughs and works with the others, building a new camp. Four walls, two windows, a roof and a door. It's not the same, but not all that different.

Jerry remembers coffee and what floors feel like under his boots. Willie carries in cardboard boxes and hangs pictures on the wall: Jerry and Loretta, young and just married; Loretta and Willie when he was a boy; Loretta by herself, older than Jerry'd ever seen her; Adele and Ralphie, aging to look like each other; Lucy. Jerry doesn't recognize some of the people in the pictures. Willie hangs something else, and it takes Jerry a while to understand what it is, standing in front of it remembering letters and words. A high school diploma with his boy's full name on it.

One of the boxes holds Jerry's father's watch, but Willie puts it in a drawer. He builds a shelf and puts books on it. Jerry warns him that the books and things might not last out here, but Willie ignores him.

 

 

Sometimes Willie brings a bottle of whiskey. Sometimes he cries.

 

 

"Town's changing," Willie says.

Jerry doesn't have much to say to Willie anymore. Sometimes he forgets he can talk at all, forgets that talking can happen even if nobody hears him. Willie isn't wearing a wedding ring, and Jerry wonders about that.

 

Willie doesn't come very often, or maybe Jerry doesn't always know it when he does. Jerry thinks Willie might be older than him now, but it doesn't matter.

 

Jerry thinks maybe he could leave if he tried. He's not sure. But he doesn't know where he'd go, and doesn't want to risk losing what he has here. It's peaceful, that's one thing about it. And someday his boy might need him again.

 

 

 

 

*


End file.
